Category: ALPHA Board

Hi all,
I just wanted to send out a note about spam and the filters that we hopefully all have in place to filter it out.

Recent estimates figure that one message in seven traveling through cyberspace is a legitimate email. Most of us have seen the ads for pharmacy this, weight loss that, and the other less, tasteful messages. Thankfully most Internet Service Providers (ISP) have tools on their mail servers to filter out the unwanted stuff with surprising accuracy. Without spam filters, we’d be swimming in junk messages.

Many of the tools ISPs employ consider the sender’s address, the mail server’s IP address, message content, frequency, and more. Much of the filtering is based on probabilities that are pretty good at weeding out the flotsam,  but occasionally the spam software will catch legitimate messages and flag them as junk. Thus, the reason for the note.

It has come to our attention that some of you may not be receiving the broadcast messages from the ALPHA Board of Directors, like this one. If you received this, it’s because you either are NOT having a problem, or you had to remove this message from your spam queue and are now reading it. The content here is aimed at the latter.

We’ve changed the mail address that the web site software sends from to hoa@…, however we can’t necessarily remove the info@… that it was sending from before because there are a number of people that use this e-mail address to contact us. If your spam server still thinks that mail coming from ALPHA is spam after this change, the easiest way to solve the problem is to either 1.) add an exception to your spam filter for anything coming from the  arnoldlilacparkhoa.org domain or 2.) contact your ISP and have them do it.

Mail providers such as Google, AT&T, and other larger companies have user tools in the administrative sections of their mail interfaces that allow you to add whatever exceptions you want. Smaller ISPs and even many regional providers don’t offer such tools requiring their support departments to enter them manually.

With as competitive as Internet Service and Mail provisioning is these days, most smaller to mid-sized companies are pretty responsive to their customer’s needs, so if you continue to have problems receiving e-mail from us because of spam filtering, please add a filter exception for “arnoldlilacparkhoa.org,” (no comma) or call your ISP and have them do it for you.

I hope all is well.

Mark